Solving the mystery! Where to find TV’s new true-crime show

S.A. viewers have written and called to say how intrigued they are by a new true-crime TV show I wrote about today called “Hardcover Mysteries.”

It debuts at 8 tonight on cable channel Investigation Discovery. Each episode features America’s most popular writers of thrillers and crime novels, including Joseph Wambaugh, Harlan Coben and Texas’ own Sandra Brown (at right). Each installment, airing on eight consecutive Mondays, outlines a homicide that led the authors to write one of their page-turning mysteries.

However, the most pressing mystery on folks’ minds is where to find the show. So, I’m donning my Sherlock Holmes hat to provide the solution. Investigation Discovery airs on various channels; which one depends on the cable or satellite service you subscribe to.

Time Warner Cable: Channel 213 (digital tier)

Grande Communications: Channel 161 (digital)

AT&T U-verse: Channel 260

DirecTV: Channel 285

Dish Network: Channel 192

OK? Tonight’s case features novelist David Baldacci. Full of political intrigue, it focuses on the 1964 murder of D.C. socialite Mary Meyer. The revelation of the victim’s secret diary – detailing her affair with President Kennedy – led many to concoct conspiracy theories implicating the CIA.

Baldacci illustrates how the case served as a partial basis for his first best-seller, Absolute Power, which became a 1997 movie starring Clint Eastwood.

Brown’s installment airs Oct. 25. Viewers will hear about the “plot twist” that intrigued Brown; a 15-year-old informant comes forward to confess that he’d been part of a local gang that was involved in a crime wave that led up to a hate crime in the small Texas town of Tyler: the 1993 murder of a young gay man named Nicholas West.

The gang, he says, began targeting homosexuals because they might be less apt to report a crime for fear of revealing their sexual identity. The biggest twist, Brown says, was the startling makeup of the gang: “Who could have imagined that one of the most ruthless gangs in East Texas was a group of misfit teenagers led by a 29-year-old sort of modern-day pied piper named Donald Aldrich?”

Hardcover Mysteries isn’t for the faint of heart. Each crime is recalled in painstaking detail by witnesses, loved ones and law enforcers, and dramatic re-enactments of the murders can be horrifying to watch.